Nvidia GPUs approach 1.5 PFlops in Folding@Home project

Posted August 26, 2008 - 11:12
by
Wolfgang Gruener

Santa Clara (CA) – Nvidia GPUs have become the leading processing platform within Folding@Home and continue to grow quickly: GeForce Processors are likely to become the first technology to break the 1.5 PFlops barrier.

Nvidia GPUs currently represent 42% of the total processing power of Folding@Home – or 1428 TFlops of a total of 3372 TFlops. While it appears that Nvidia can increase its overall share in this environment only slowly, it has become the leading technology and is now close to be hitting 1.5 PFlops of overall performance. The current performance is achieved with 12,982 processing units, according to the statistics released by Folding@Home.

The second most powerful platform is Sony’s PS3 with 1251 TFlops (44,379 processors), followed by ATI Radeon graphics cards with 404 TFlops (3677 processors). At least in comparison with ATI/AMD, Nvidia’s advantage is currently based solely on the sheer number of GPUs on the network. Broken down to each unit, both Nvidia and ATI processors deliver 110 GFlops on average. PS3s are measured at 28 GFlops, while Windows CPUs, which represent the majority in absolute numbers on the network (211,978 active units), provide about 9 GFlops each.

“Applications like Folding@Home are just the beginning, every day we are seeing more and more examples of computing problems that are benefitting from CUDA and our GPU technologies,” said Michael Steele, general manager of visual consumer solutions at Nvidia, in a prepared statement.